Some background info on the Elves (Wier's version)

[Note: this is more related to conculture than conlang.]

Now that we're talking about proto-languages...

In my work in progress, currently titled _The Four Horsemen_ (or "FourHorse"),
there is a nomadic race of humanoids popularly called Elves.  They have
elongated faces and ears, like familiar depictions of elves in other traditions.
But these elves resemble depictions of Egyptian pharaohs and others, having
large dark eyes and cat-like features as well as bronze-colored skin and black
wool-like hair.  My version of the elves, in fact, inhabited the Nile region for
thousands of years.

Their origins go back at least 10,000 years however.  Some associate the Elves
with Plato's idea of the lost island Atlantis, and others propose an east
African origin some two million years ago, a parallel development alongside
_homo sapiens_ that were thought to have become extinct.  In any case, they were
definitely present during the earliest dynasties of Egypt as nomadic tribes.
After the conquest of Egypt by the Babylonians (then the Persians, then the
Greeks, then the Romans), they were dispersed as far as India, Ethiopia and
Europe.

Eventually, as Rome fell, as Christianity and Islam spread, and as the New World
was being colonized, the Elves ended up in just about every place in the world.
But around the year 2000, they rediscovered their common heritage and assembled
in Cairo, declaring themselves as "a nation without borders", and began to
standardize their ancestral language, Tech.

[I've already given some of the data on Tech, a Nostratic derivative with
grammatical features from Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European mostly; all to be put
on my homepage before long.  Next post: the nature of the Tech consonant root,
or what I call a "word skeleton".]

~DaW~


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